The Throne of Bones Read online

  “Yes, that might—please, try,” he said when she writhed down and lowered the iron gate of her muzzle to his chilled genitals, for he thought she meant to kiss them again; but that was by no means her intention.

  * * * *

  With the corpse of the poet slung over her spinal ridge, Gluttoria stamped homeward in a fury. Her timid tender of love had been spurned. Worse, her hope of retrieving the ingrate’s souvenirs of lubricity by eating his male parts had been mocked by a dull dream of a flailing hand that had nearly beaten her into a stupor.

  “Where’s your duster, you idle shitabed?” Polliard roared when she stooped to enter their home. “Has no one cleaned this chamber since the hounds’ banquet? What mean all these whoreson bones and liches?”

  She laughed, her rage swept away on a wave of delight in her child. He had been gnawing on a servant, and he spoke with the booming voice of a butler to the Fands, dead these two hundred years. In the next instant he was laughing like a normal two-year-old, or like one who had learned to laugh from a ghoul.

  “Eyes!” he cried in his proper voice, spotting a rare delicacy and stretching up to grip the poet’s nose. “Eyes!”

  She dumped her burden and popped out one of the treats for him, watching fondly as he sucked and savored it the way she would have. She had almost dreaded the dreary sights those eyes must hold, but she grew curious when Polliard’s face glowed with wonder.

  “No, dearest, this one’s for mother,” she said firmly when he tried to snatch the second eye.

  “People fighting,” he said incorrectly, and she sighed as she chewed and beheld the moonlit interwreathings of undulant bodies that had so fascinated the dead man. His eyes had more zest than his testicles, and she wished now that she had kept both of the former for herself. But even that would have been no substitute. She knew that she had to go once more among the ghouls.

  * * * *

  Gluttoria braved the light of day to spy upon the living. She lurked behind bushes and squirmed through ditches to trail processions bearing the smallest coffins. She watched the grieving mothers for any false note in their wailing, any lack of conviction in their pitiful gestures. More rigorous than an unbought critic, she rejected them all as adoptive parents for Polliard.

  She studied mothers with living children, noting each blow, each harsh word, each lapse of attention. She recalled her own childhood with its overfond uncle, spiteful mother, absent father and tiresome brothers. The necropolis was the only place to raise her son, and she was his only fit mother. She had no choice but to bring him with her to the tunnels of the underground host.

  * * * *

  “Promise!” she commanded.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Vomikron grunted.

  “Promise, damn you! Say it!”

  “Yes, yes, yes!”

  Gluttoria wrenched free from the King of Ghouls and kicked him in the snout when he tried to splice their interrupted conjunction.

  “What is it you want, you impossible creature? We missed you, we love you, we desire you more than any other, haven’t we said what you want? Lie down, before our royal balls burst!”

  “My son,” she said.

  “Oh, that. Why do you insist—oh, never mind, very well, we’ll honor your whim. We won’t hurt him. We won’t let anyone hurt him. You have our word as King.”

  His word meant no more than his title, Gluttoria knew, for she, too, was a ghoul. And because she was, she couldn’t deny him, or herself.

  “Oh yes, Vomikron! Yes, my King!”

  * * * *

  It was true that Vomikron desired her above all others, but as she had been: the jolliest of ghouls, a star shining among some very dim wicks indeed. Ghouls love pranks, but few had the old Gluttoria’s genius for conceiving them; and in playing them, none matched her boldness and dash.

  He recalled how they had invaded the Temple of Death to steal the body of a despised sergeant of the watch named Gorpho. They had filled his coffin with an equal weight of ghoul-droppings, which were next morning enshrined with full municipal honors in an impregnable tomb. With phenomenal self-restraint, the two ghouls had rationed his pieces between them for months in order to keep satirizing the oaf.

  One night the adventurous Gluttoria ate just enough of Gorpho’s heart and brain to fool his old comrades themselves, and she stormed into their lodge bawling orders at malingerers. One watchman was trampled in the rush to escape the revenant, and his corpse, too, was carried below.

  But that was before she had excreted that blond tumor, that warm-blooded maggot, that pudgy bundle of snivels and giggles and gawks that dared to play horsey with him, but only when the conniving mollycoddle knew that his shrew of a mother was near. Bearing the monster had driven her mad, and her wits would return only when the changeling was gone.

  Even had the King not desired his favorite’s recovery, the child would have been like a gallstone stuck in his teeth. Vomikron had once been beautiful, he had been precocious, the Sun God had shone from his radiant face on the dullest day, and a mother had trumpeted his unique genius when he had remembered to wipe his nose. Now he dwelt in filth and scavenged among the dead.

  Gluttoria had lately taken to going aboveground by day with the child, saying the fresh air and sunshine would do him good. Vomikron’s own mother would say the same when he spent too many hours dreaming over the scientific collection he had gathered from the graveyard. Why had he never listened? Polliard—the obscene name made him scream whenever he thought it!—listened. He would grow up to be a man, a man who knew too much about the Lower Kingdom.

  He wouldn’t have to hurt the little horror, not necessarily, to get him out of the way. If he could be made to stray, some mortal would collect him, most likely a childcatcher gathering slaves. His beauty would earn him a place as a pampered catamite, and when it lost its first blush he would get enough fresh air, sunshine and exercise to satisfy the most demanding mother by pulling a galley’s oar.

  But the boy was too smart, and he had been treasonably warned against his own King. The problem seemed insoluble until just before dawn one morning when Vomikron was prowling a paupers’ pit and someone unwittingly dumped the fresh body of a young woman on top of him.

  * * * *

  Alphea’s feet ached with cold. The pain jolted her from a nightmare where a toothless witch prodded her and forced her to drink vile potions. She tried to rearrange the bedclothes until she realized that there were none, nor clothes of any kind.

  She dropped to a crouch before she even dared look for prying eyes. It was a familiar dream, walking naked in the open, but this was no dream. Her feet were so cold because they were soaked with dew. At least there was no one to see her, but neither was there anyone to help her get home.

  She knew that she was on Dreamers’ Hill, surrounded by sarcophagi whose cracks and mossy stains spoke of great age. That was no more helpful than knowing she was in Crotalorn, for the cemetery was a city in itself. She believed she had heard that the sun rose in the east, but when she tried to correlate that notion with the real sun, and with her recollection of the city’s layout, she only gave herself a headache.

  If she walked downhill, she would leave the hill: that made sense. But something inside her insisted that she walk uphill. This made no sense, but the feeling was too strong to fight—until she glimpsed a scrap of white cloth behind a bush. The need to cover her nakedness was so strong that Alphea ignored the inner voice and ran downhill to see if that cloth would serve.

  She nearly tumbled into a pit of shrouded corpses. A raucous storm of crows exploded in her face from the white cloth at the rim of the pit. It was another shroud, one that had been torn open. The body inside had been torn open, too, its skull cracked and its ribs pried apart. Its hair was black as her own, but that was one of the few details she noted before she ran. Her inner voice told her sternly to stop screaming and stop fretting about clothes.

  It was most unlike the inner voice she was used to. That voice had told her not to
lie with Crondard, the handsome stableboy. It had told her not to seek out the old woman on Plum Street, but to confess her shame to her parents and endure their displeasure. That voice had been easy to ignore. The new one was like a savage dog barking in her head, drowning out her proper thoughts.

  The witch in Plum Street.... Alphea stopped short and inspected herself. The mound that had been so obvious to her, but that not even her prying sister had noticed, was gone; her belly was positively flat. But she felt no pain, no unpleasant sensation at all. No one had suggested the witch was that good! She laughed, but her laugh rang hollow, and with her next breath she tasted tears that had rolled to her quivering lip. She wished—she didn’t know what she wished, only that she were home in bed, preferably fast asleep.

  “You’re a woman, aren’t you?” piped a voice from the air.

  Alphea’s arms jumped to shield her breasts. She searched wildly for an invisible imp until she discovered a small boy perched above her on the roof of a tomb. He wore only a shawl fit for the burial of an ancient prince, worked with gold threads and fringed with opals set in silver.

  “Of course we are!” she cried, and was distracted from her curious slip of the tongue by a burning flush. He should have been too young to embarrass her, but his gaze was impudent beyond his years. She dropped one hand to shield her crotch.

  “I’ve never seen one walk,” he said, and slid off the tomb to land at her side like a cat. While she was still marveling at his agility, he pinched her thigh. “You feel different, too—Mama!”

  She had slapped his hand and was considering further retaliation when he let out that hideous shriek. “Where is your mother?” she demanded. “We’ll have her teach you manners, you little monster!”

  “She went to find strawberries. She says they’re good for me.” No other child had ever made a face of disgust that could chill her. He said, “I much prefer liver.”

  Alphea screamed: neither at his inhuman grimace nor his strange words, but at the horror bounding toward them from a thicket. She thought it was a wolf, then a wild hog, then a human freak, but she took no time to sort out these mad impressions, for quite plainly it was death itself, and it was coming for her. She snatched up the child and ran, not daring to look back.

  The boy screamed, too, screamed for his mother. He foolishly tried to wriggle from her grasp, biting her neck viciously, but she ignored the pain and gripped him tighter. The thing screamed behind them, but her inner voice screamed loudest of all. It urged her to run until her heart burst and keep on running.

  Shouts answered her. A serpent of mourners writhed into segments, some running from her and others hurrying forward. The snarls and shrieks at her back were impossibly close. Help was too far away. She wrenched forth an extra burst of speed, but a claw raked her shoulder.

  Something erupted in her head, as if that tiny inner voice were a boil that suddenly swelled and burst to deluge all the corridors of her mind with its noxious fluids. With strength she hadn’t known she possessed, with ruthlessness she knew she didn’t possess, she gripped the child by his ankles and slung him ahead in a high arc. The mourners shrieked with dismay, and some charged faster in an attempt to catch the whirling boy before his brains could be dashed out.

  By the time she cut to the left, knowing that Gluttoria would stay in pursuit of the boy, the part that called itself Alphea was a whisper from a fading dream. The soul of Vomikron Noxis impelled the running form, which ran faster but grew less human with every step. It pained him to see Gluttoria race headlong into a mob of men whose swords and daggers were flashing out; but at least it proved that she was hopelessly mad, and that he was better off without her.

  * * * *

  Dodont often told his few regular patrons at the Willing Lepress that the things of this world were as shadows to the pious, but he was known as a sour man, and skeptics ascribed this to his signal lack of shadows. Most unlike himself, he whistled as he buffed the bust of the late and neglected poet, Picote Phrein.

  “Why are you happy?” demanded a Fomorian Guardsman who drank here every morning because the innkeeper’s normal mood suited him.

  “You saw the new sign, the Plume and Parchment?”

  “If you want to honor Picote, you should call it Ferret-Face’s Dog-Oil Shed, as he did.”

  “When he wasn’t begging for credit.” Dodont spat on the bust, paused for a moment, then resumed polishing. “Nothing’s so good for business as a dead poet, and I picked him for a winner.”

  “Better than when he was farting and puking and telling us all what rotten guts we have. Ar’s crabs!” The barbarian shuddered to recall the poet’s ways.

  “Why do you think I put up with him? Now the mayor is coming here today, Lord Vendrard, and a dozen of our currently immortal poets to dedicate—”

  “They make enough noise, don’t they?”

  It was too early, certainly. The fowls and joints and the suckling pig for the banquet to honor Picote weren’t in the oven yet. But the guardsman was right: a mob had burst tumultuously into Hound Square.

  “Ar’s botch! Is that our mayor they’re hoisting to the lamppost?”

  * * * *

  The mayor never came. He had recently made a sarcastic riposte to critics who had faulted him for ignoring a rumored plague of ghouls. He saw no need to verify his conviction that the creature hung up on display that morning was only a monstrous hyena. His presence in Hound Square would confuse the superstitious, he said, in excusing himself from the poet’s memorial feast.

  By noon, word of the marvel had bounced back and forth across the Miraga and up and down Crotalorn’s five hills. A solid mass of human beings jammed the square and the streets leading into it. None of the other dignitaries felt that the effort of fighting through that mob was justified by either a dead poet or a dying ghoul.

  Those who came for a free show were disinclined to pay for drinks; nor did many who had viewed the speared, gaffed and imperfectly disjointed horror as it rotted before their eyes want to sample Dodont’s banquet, even at reduced prices. As the day wore on, closed doors and windows could not keep the smell of the thing from the inn.

  “The more it steams away, the more it looks like an ordinary girl,” the Fomor said. “Are they playing a joke?”

  If his only customer had much more to drink he would believe that Picote’s bust was an ordinary girl, too, but Dodont poured more wine and said, “A girl wouldn’t be alive. See how it watches the sun.”

  The innkeeper ground his teeth as he said this, for the thing’s apparent devotion to Polliel mocked his religion. It would die, said the watchmen who hung it there and refused to remove it, if it spent the full day in the sun; but the abomination seemed entranced by the deadly sight.

  When he could tolerate such blasphemy no longer, Dodont went out and fought his way through the crowd to the ring of watchmen. “It keeps mouthing the God’s name,” he protested. “Can’t you stop it?”

  “Polliard,” a watchman said. “That was the name of the boy it would have killed, if some woman hadn’t saved him. She ran off before anyone could thank her.”

  “And the boy?”

  “To be sold, unless someone claims him. Besides her.” He jerked his thumb at the dangling ghoul and laughed.

  “Look at that! Look! It’s saying Polliel, I tell you!”

  “Polliard,” the watchman sighed, and looked away.

  In fact Dodont was right. Staring at the sun, Gluttoria was thinking of those gilded candies she had been too tender-hearted to eat as a girl. She might have stared all day in wonder at the beautiful sun if the innkeeper, enraged by her sacrilege and his lost business, had not snatched the inattentive watchman’s bill and poked her eyes out.

  IV

  The Doctor’s Tale

  I took some satisfaction from slamming the door of my office behind me with all my strength. I would have been better satisfied if the head of the odious dilettante who had thwarted me at the auction had been peeking through it.r />
  Apart from his status as a minor specimen of the Vendren Tribe, I knew nothing about the man, but a reflexive dislike had seized me from the moment I first noticed him loitering at the Anatomical Institute. The sound of his laughter, a staccato wheeze, was merely distasteful, but the sight of it, with its attendant twitches and tics, was nauseous. He could have been a student or even an instructor, but I suspected he was one of those who prowl the fringes of schools for unsavory purposes. I often saw him in the company of a boy whose striking beauty was marred by an air of precocious depravity. Just the sight of those two typically lurking in a shadowy corner, with a group of admiring students hanging on their words, could put me out of sorts for the rest of the day.

  My dislike had been unreasonable, perhaps, but today it found a reason.

  I am an enthusiast for the work of Chalcedor, an unappreciated genius who flourished two centuries ago. Critics dismiss his vision as provincial, which it was, and pornographic, which it also was; but he gives us a picture of life in Crotalorn as real people lived it in his day, a day more to my taste than the bumptious, tawdry, jostling present. I find his rare manuscripts especially enthralling, since he would doodle in the margins while waiting for inspiration to strike. Often naughty, sometimes whimsical, his sketches let me glimpse the mind of a long-dead man who seems to have been not much different from myself.

  Studying an auctioneer’s catalog a week ago, I noticed an unsorted lot of books and papers from the estate of Magister Meinaries, whose name no one but a student of Chalcedor would know, who had lent money to the writer when, as often happened, he fell on hard times. The lot was most likely nothing but law-books and ledgers, but I persuaded myself that it must hold at least one of several lost manuscripts, and I foolishly expanded on this notion aloud while perambulating the quadrangle with an associate.

  I did not observe that Vendren person skulking nearby while I babbled, but he must have overheard, for the detestable man came to the auction, and came with much more money than I brought. He paid an absurdly high sum for a box that was, on the face of it, nothing but rubbish, confirming my suspicion that he had filched my intuition.